3525 



py 1 



THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



VOLUME 18. NUMBER 17 



LII ERATURE SERIES 2 

J. WARSHAW, EDITOR 



AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

GEORGE NO RLIN 

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE TNIVERSH YOF COLORADO 




ISSUED THREE TIMES MONTHLY; ENTERED AS SECOND CLASS MATTER 
.\T THE POSTOFFICE AT COLUMBIA, MISSOURI -!.5Wi 

JULY 6. 1917 



\ 






AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

GEORGE NORLIN 

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE 

THE ALPHA CHAPTER OF MISSOURI 
PHI BETA KAPPA 



June 5, 1917 



EDITOR S NOTE 

It lies peculiarly within the province of' 
teachers of the Classics to instil in us that poise 
so invaluable in the presence of contemporary up- 
heavals. Professor Norlin's striking parallel be- 
tween the German point of view of today and 
the Athenian point of view of the past cannot 
fail to impress those who read his instructive 
address. 



P. 0^ ^* 
OCT 3 19t/ 



(2) 



AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 



Some time ago I found myself in a Los Angeles hotel with- 
out any money. I had, however, a small New York draft which 
I presented confidently at the desk. I say confidently, for I 
had been struck, as has every traveler in California, by the ac- 
commodating eagerness of the people of that State to honor 
drafts, checks, or any other such evidence of a disposition to 
part with one's possessions. Imagine, therefore, my chagrin 
when the clerk demanded, in that supercilious tone which I 
suppose the privileged have taken with suppliants since the be- 
ginning of time, whether I had any one who could identify me. 
I said, "No, I am an utter stranger here." Now ordinarily being 
a stranger in Los Angeles is a sufficient guarantee of respecta- 
bility, but my identity as a tourist was, it seems, in question. 
The clerk retired and presently returned with the manager. 
Again I was chilled by a cold scrutiny ; again I was hurt by 
searching questions. Had I no way of proving that I was sail- 
ing under my own colors — no letters, no credentials of any kind? 
I searched through the pockets of my coat, in vain ; of my 
vest, in vain. I began to grow suspicious of myself when my 
fingers in their nervous excursions to and fro chanced upon my 
watch fob and my golden key. I seized upon it with joyous 
relief. "Here", I said, "is the token of my membership in Phi 
Beta Kappa. You see my name inscribed upon it and the place 
and time of my election." He looked at it gingerly, almost shrink- 
ing as from something weird and uncanny ; and finally, as if 
eager to get back on mortal and familiar ground, he asked "You 
haven't got an Elk's card about your clothes, have you?" 

Ladies and gentlemen, it was a trying situation on which I 
do not care to dwell. I will only say that I tried then as I have 
tried since to show myself worthy of our traditions. I sum- 
moned what I could of academic dignity ; I tried hard to be "the 
captain of my soul." But it was difficult then and I confess I 
have often found it difficult since. Will you forgive me if I say 
that I find it difficult now ? I thiiik I know what a Phi Beta Kap- 
pa address ought to be ; I think I know that it is expected to drop 

(3) 



4 AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

gently upon the ears from the heights of an unruffled, Olympian 
calm. "It is sweet," said, the placid philosopher, "to look upon 
the mighty contests of war arrayed along the plains without 
yourself sharing in the danger ; it is sweet to hold the lofty and 
serene positions well fortified by the learning of the wise from 
which you may look down upon others and see them wandering 
all abroad and going astray in their search for the path of life, 
. . . their striving night and day with surpassing effort to 
struggle up to the summit of power and be masters of the 
world." 

I, however, cannot rise to such philosophical aloofness. I 
am of the world in which men appear to have dethroned Zeus 
and set up the idol Whirligig, and I reel with the common vertigo. 
I am of the world in which men pluck the God of Nations by 
the ear and chat familiarly with "unscrem guten alien deut- 
schcn Gott dort ohen," and I find myself dazed and bewildered 
with the rest. I am of the world which has observed with ad- 
miration, not to say affection, the rise of a wonderful people to 
imperial greatness, to a first place in commerce, in beneficent so- 
cial legislation, in effective political organization, in the coun- 
cils of the nations, in science, in literature, in the arts — a people 
so rich in what we term the gifts of civilization that their wealth 
has overflowed their boundaries and penetrated all the world — 
a people who have given us many of our best Americans — a 
people who have taught many of us in their universities and 
impressed us by their kindness, their sentiment, even their softness 
of heart ; and I am of the world which has seen that people turn 
to the worship of iron, "Gott der Eiseii zvachseii licss," preach 
the gospel of hate, exalt cruelty to a virtue, and justify itself as 
the cyclone or the flood might justify itself, by the necessity of its 
own existence. 

It seems a contradiction in nature, a reversal of the inevitable 
order of things. It is as if a tree should grow downward, or 
the sun fall from the sky, or the stars crash about our heads. It 
is Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values" with a vengeance. I 
can think of nothing else; I can speak of nothing else. The most 
that I can do is to view it not as a thing altogether unique, not as 
some new diabolism hoarded up by malicious Fate against our 
time, but as an old tragedy on a new stage, and, seeing it in this 



GERMANY AND ATHENS: THE WORSHIP OF IRON 5 

light, to derive for myself such mental comfort as comes from 
stripping away the vague terrors of the unknown. 

Some twenty-four centuries ago the greatest of Greek his- 
torians told the grim story of the Peloponnesian War. He char- 
acterized that protracted struggle as the most terrible within the 
memory of man. It engaged practically the whole of what was 
then the significant world; all the Greek states were involved 
sooner or later, and barbarians as well. It was a world war and 
a world calamity. Famine and plague conspired with slaughter 
and exile to debase the spirit of man. Never had there been 
such a complete "transvaluation of all values." "Words," says 
Thucydides, "had no longer the same relation to things. Reck- 
less aggression was loyal courage ; prudential delay was the ex- 
cuse of a coward ; frantic energy was the true quality of a man ; 
the lover of violence alone was free from the charge of hypoc- 
risy; the seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship 
in crime ; the 'honest simplicity which is so large a part of a 
noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. Striving 
in every way to overcome each other, men committed the most 
monstrous crimes, observing neither the bounds of justice nor 
of expediency, but making the caprice of the moment their 
law. Those who were of neither party fell a prey to both ; either 
they were disliked because they held aloof or men were jealous 
of their surviving. Human nature, having trampled under foot 
all laws, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, 
that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything 
above her. . . . But when men are retaliating upon others 
they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those 
common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his 
hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity. They 
forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in 
vain."* 

Such are some of the dark colors in which the Athenian his- 
torian draws the picture of events which occurred in his own 
time "and of like events," he adds with gloomy clairvoyance, 
"which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of 
human things." 

*The renderings from Thucydides are, for the most part, those of 
Jowett. 



O AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

I am aware that the distinguished President Emeritus of 
Harvard University has recently warned us against taking our 
instruction from ancient history. "The social and individual 
problems of life were," he objects, "simpler in the ancient world 
than in the modern, and they were often solved by giving play 
to the elemental passions of human nature ; so that the study of 
them affords but imperfect guidance to wise action amid the 
wider and more complex conditions of the modern world." It 
would be silly presumption on my part not to respect the words 
of so wise a man and so ripe a scholar, and it is with hesitating dif- 
fidence that I venture the opinion that the distinction between 
ancient and modern times is not that human nature was more 
elemental then than now. It was undoubtedly more simple, more 
frank, more itself, more naked than now. Modern civilization is 
more millineristic, more artificially, more fantastically dressed. 
Our motives, our impulses, our aspirations even are more elabo- 
rately be-wigged, be-hobbled and be-high-heeled ; and when we 
approach the ancients with our passion for disguises, we are 
apt to be shocked, as Dr. Eliot is shocked, to find them insuf- 
ficiently clothed. 

If this is a real difference, and I believe it is, it may be 
questioned whether it is the part of a sound education to shun 
altogether the ancient simplicities and directnesses for the more 
impenetrable proprieties and complexities of a later world. In 
any case we must take our parallels where we find them, and I 
can find no such illuminating parallel to the outstanding features 
of the present cataclysm as is found in Thucydides' account of 
the Peloponnesian War and particularly of the tragic career of 
Athens in the course of that war. The parallel has been noted 
more than once. Gilbert Murray has touched upon it in the 
preface to his translation of the Trojan Woman of Euripides; 
Irving Babbitt has mentioned it in a clever article in The Nation; 
and all students of Greek history must in these last years have 
read into the empty saying that history repeats itself a fulness 
of ominous verity. 

That ancient world war, like all wars that have ever hap- 
pened, had its roots in the past. In order to appreciate any- 
thing of its significance we must go back fifty years to the con- 
flict between the Greeks and the Persians, which, I need not re- 



ATHENS AGAINST TYRANNY 7 

mind you, was essentially a struggle between Eastern despotism 
and free institutions. Again and again the pages of Herodotus, the 
historian of this war, are lighted up by the Hellenic worship of 
liberty, of the right of each state to work out its own salvation 
in its own way, to be free to make and obey its own commands. 
Freedom was as yet a new and glorious birth in the world, and 
never before or since has it seemed so sweet as then when it con- 
fronted its first terrible danger. "Tyranny," Herodotus makes 
one of his characters say, "Tyranny disturbs ancient laws, vio- 
lates women and kills men without trial; but a free people rul- 
ing themselves have in the first place the most beautiful name 
in the world, and in the next place, they do none of these things." 
I need not remind you either that in this fight of the Greeks for 
freedom Athens among the Greek states played the noblest part. 
Sinking her own ambitions in a common cause, yielding to 
others the precedence she herself deserved, thinking first of 
Hellas and second of herself, she proved herself, as Herodotus 
says in his matter of fact way, the "Savior of the Greeks." 
And she had her reward. Many, a great many, of the Greek 
states forgot for the time being their local pride and jealousy and 
enrolled themselves right willingly under her leadership in a 
league to make the world safe against tyranny. The records of 
the years from the formation of this so-called Confederacy of 
Delos to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War are sadly in- 
complete, but even so they reveal a steady outflow of energy 
from Athens which is simply astounding. Consider her military 
exploits alone, and you would think that she had no time for any- 
thing but fighting. Consider how active she was in erecting for- 
tifications and in beautifying the city, and the Acropolis, and you 
would think that she had no time for anything but building. Con- 
sider her political history, the rapid steps by which her govern- 
ment at home became a true partnership of all the citizens in 
the high business of the state, and you would think that she 
must have concentrated on political reform. Consider her achieve- 
ments in letters, and you would think that her vitality must have 
been chiefly of the spirit. Consider that while she was doing all 
this and more, she was busy welding the restless, centrifugal units 
of the confederacy into an empire, and you throw up your hands 
and explain with Pindar : datiidvLov nrokUdpo^^ a city of more- 
than-men ! 



8 AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

Is it any wonder, human nature beings what it has been till 
now, that with this energ}^ Athens grew ambitious to energize 
the world? Is it any wonder that she sought to extend the sphere, 
of her beneficent influence? Is it any wonder that she said to the 
members of her empire wdien they grew weary of basking in her 
glory, "You are better off with us," and accompanied the words by 
an invincible gesture of power? Is it any wonder that, knowing 
by intuition and experience that her institutions were the best in 
the world, she should have sent them abroad with her armies 
and ships of war and forced them upon those who preferred their 
own? And is it any wonder, human nature being wdiat it has 
been till now, that Athens, once best beloved of Greek states as 
champion of liberty, came to be execrated by most of the world 
as a tyrant? 

When Herodotus called Athens the "Savior of Greece," the 
Peloponnesian ^Var had already begun, and he felt it necessary 
to preface his eulogy with these words : "Here I am compelled by 
the facts to express an opinion which will be offensive to most of 
mankind." And Thucydides makes the hatred against Athens 
still clearer: "The feeling of mankind was strongly on the side of 
the Spartans, for they were now the avowed liberators of Hellas. 
Cities and individuals were eager to assist them to the utmost 
both by word and deed. In general the indignation against the 
Athenians was intense ; some were trying to be delivered from 
them and others fearful of falling under their sway." 

This, then, is the situation of Athens at the beginning of the 
War: the strongest military power in Greece at the head of an 
empire noAv hekl together by force ; isolated by the fear and hos- 
tility of the rest of the world and on the whole proud of that isola- 
tion, for, in a sense, it is the isolation of greatness. "Consider," 
says one of the Corinthian envoys, speaking to the Spartans,"what 
manner of men are these Athenians with whom you will have to 
fight. They are bold beyond their strength ; they run risks which 
prudence would condemn ; but in the midst of misfortunes they 
are full of hope. When conquerors they pursue their victory to 
the utmost ; when defeated they fall back the least. Their bodies 
they devote to their country as though they belonged to other men ; 
their true self is their mind which is most truly their own when 
employed in her service. When they do not carry out an inten- 



ATHENS, THE EXPONENT OF FORCE 9 

tion which they have formed they seem to themselves to have 
sustained a personal bereavement; when an enterprise succeeds, 
they have gained a mere instalment of what is to come, but if 
they fail they at once conceive new hopes and so fill up the void. 
iVVith them alone, to hope is to have, for they lose not a moment 
in the execution of an idea. This is the lifelong task, full of dan- 
ger and toil, which they are always imposing on themselves. To 
do their duty is their only holiday and they deem the quiet of in- 
action to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a 
man should say of them in a word that they were born neither 
to have peace themselves nor allow peace to other men, he would 
simply speak the truth." 

These are words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of 
an enemy. What a great Athenian could say on the same sub- 
ject he records in the splendid funeral oration spoken by Pericles 
in honor of his countrymen who fell in the first battles of the 
War : 

"To sum up — I say that Athens is the school of Hellas and 
that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have 
the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action 
with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and 
idle word but truth and fact ; and the assertion is verified by the 
position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in 
the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is su- 
perior to the report of her. ISTo enemy who comes against her 
is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of 
such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy 
of him. And we shall assuredly be not without witnesses; there 
are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the won- 
der of this and succeeding ages ; we shall not need the praises of 
Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for 
the moment . . . For we have compelled every land and 
every sea to open a path to our valour and have everywhere 
planted memorials of our friendship and our enmity. Such is the 
city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died ; they 
could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them ; 
and everyone of us who survive should gladly toil in her behalf." 

I have taken but a paragraph from a wonderful eulogy of 
a wonderful people. If there breathes through it a feeling that 



10 AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

this sacred city is so lifted above the levels of ordinary humanity 
as to be "beyond good and evil," that it is the sanctuary of civil- 
ization, the leaven which is to leaven the world ; if, in a word, the 
speech of Pericles has a taint of hubris in it, this is at least as easy 
for us to excuse, as it is for Kuno Francke, in his apology for 
Germany, to justify "that spirit of superciliousness, which, as a 
very natural concomitant of a century of extraordinary achieve- 
ment, has developed, especially during the last twenty-five years, 
in the ruling classes of Germiany." There is such a thing as par- 
donable pride in accomplishments which promise well for human- 
ity. Compare the words of a less restrained spokesman for Ger- 
man ideals : "The world dominion of which Germany dreams is 
not blind to the lessons of the Napoleonic tyranny. Force alone, 
violence or brute strength by its mere presence or by its loud 
manifestation in war, may be necessary to establish this dominion, 
but its ends are spiritual. The triumph of the empire will be the 
triumph of German Kultur, of the German world vision in all its 
phases and departments of human life and energy; in religion, 
in poetry, in science, arts, politics, and in social endeavor." The 
utterance of Pericles is infinitely higher in tone, but its essence 
is the same. Power is not an end in itself. Faust-recht rests 
upon Kultur-recht. The will to dominate is sublimated by the 
crusader's zeal. 

But listen again to Pericles when the reverses and rancors 
of war have touched even that great soul with cynicism : "Do 
not imagine that you are fighting about a simple issue, freedom or 
slavery. You have an empire to lose and there is the danger to 
which your imperial rule has exposed you. Neither can you re- 
sign your power if at this crisis any timorous or inactive spirit 
is for playing the honest man. For by this time your empire 
has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have 
been unjustly gained but cannot be safely surrendered. These 
men (i. e., men whom scruples of justice rob of power of aggres- 
sion) would soon ruin a city, and if they were to go and found a 
state of their own they would equally ruin that." 

When Pericles said this he was a sick and discouraged man, 
and had not long to live. Even so, the brutal implication of his 
statement is redeemed by the dignity of a nature which could 
never be ignoble. It remained for a blatant successor to his lead- 



SCRAPS OF PAPER AND THE LIKE — IN ATHENS 11 

ership of the war party in Athens to speak more, frankly. Plead- 
ing before the Athenian Assembly for a policy of frightfulness 
Cleon shouted : "Do not be misled by the most deadly enemies of 
empire, pity and fine words and equity" — a sentiment upon which 
the mad philosopher of modern Germany has set the seal of his 
high approval. "In vigorous eras," says Nietzsche, "noble civiliza- 
tions see something contemptible in sympathy, in brotherly love, 
in lack of self assertion and self reliance.'' 

Long before this time, the poet Hesiod had laid down the 
principle which was good enough for old fashioned Greece : "For 
the birds of the air and the beasts of the field hath Zeus ordained 
one law : that they prey upon one another ; but for man hath 
he ordained justice which is by far the best." But a new philos- 
ophy was now changing all that. There is but one law : The big 
eat the little, the mighty inherit the earth. Moral commands and 
prohibitions — pity, mercy, brotherly love, good faith, just deal- 
ing — are mere conventions, mere conspiracies entered into by the 
weak against the strong, and have no justification whatever in the 
nature of things. Might is the only right. "Nature herself," says 
a speaker in Plato's Gorgias, "proves that it is right for the better 
man to exploit the worse, for the stronger to exploit the weaker. 
Again and again she reveals this truth both in the case of the 
animals and in the case of men in states and nations. By what 
right did Xerxes lead his army against Greece, or Darius march 
against the Scythians? One could give countless instances in 
which people act according to the law of nature, and not accord- 
ing to that artificial law which we set up when we attempt to 
mould the best and strongest among us, taking them in hand when 
they are young, taming, as it were, our lion-cubs with magic for- 
mulas and spells, and try to make slaves out of them by preach- 
ing that we should enjoy equality and that this is beautiful and 
right. But in spite of us, when a man is born with a nature strong 
enough, he shakes himself free of all these shackles, smashes 
through our hedges, tramples under foot our scraps of paper, our 
hypocritical tricks and charms and laws which are against nature ; 
and lo our slave stands over us revealed as our master, and the 
justice of nature dawns in splendor." 

Such doctrines were in the air, and lent no little aid and com- 
fort to the rampant chauvinism of the period. They stand out 



12 AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

naked and unashamed in the plea by which the Athenians jus- 
tified the atrocity of Melos. The Httle Island of Melos had stead- 
ily refused to take sides in the war and for a season was left in 
peace. Her neutrality was, however, a moral challenge to the 
Athenian Empire, and at the opportune time the Athenians landed 
a force upon Melos and demanded the submission of her people. 
Thucydides devotes page after page to the negotiations which 
were carried on, and the speeches which he records on both sides 
present very vividly a dramatic conflict of national aspirations 
moving grimly to its tragic climax. The Athenian actors drop 
all disguise of fine words. The Melians, they admit, had never 
harmed them ; their only oflfense was their defenselessness, and 
they must yield to the empire of the strong. No Treitschke had 
as yet uttered the famous dictum that "Among all political sins, 
the sin of feebleness is the most contemptible ; it is the political 
sin against the Holy Ghost." But such was substantially the 
Athenian argument. The Melians, in their turn, urge that it is 
their right to be free, that justice is on their side, and that there- 
fore they are confident of the favor of Heaven, to which the 
Athenians reply : 

"As for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their 
favor as you, for we are not doing or claiming anything which 
goes beyond common opinion concerning divine or men's desires 
about human things. For of the gods we believe and of men we 
know that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they 
will. This law was not made by us and we are not the first to 
have acted upon it and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know 
that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we, would do 
as we do. . . . Surely you cannot dream of flying to that 
false sense of honor which has been the ruin of so many when 
danger stared them in the face. Many men with their eyes still 
open to the consequences have found the word "honor" too much 
for them and have suffered a mere name to lure them on until 
it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities ; 
through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonor than 
fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you 
will not run this risk. You ought to see that there can be no dis- 
grace in yielding to a great city which invites you to become her 
ally on reasonable terms, keeping your own land and merely 



THE BELGIUM OF ANCIENT GREECE 13 

paying tribute, and you will ceftainly gain no honor, if, having 
to choose between two alternatives, safety and war, you obsti- 
nately prefer the worse." 

Incredibly and nobly the Melians preferred "honor" and "the 
worse." "Men of Athens," they said, "our resolution is unchang- 
ed and we will not in a moment surrender the liberty which our 
city, founded seven hundred years ago, still enjoys. We will trust 
to the good fortune which by the favor of the gods has hitherto 
preserved us . . . and endeavor to save ourselves." Vain 
hope and trust ! God was on the side of the strongest battalions ; 
and "the Athenians," says Thucydides, speaking with restrained 
and unnatural calm, "put to death all the Melians who were of 
military age and made slaves of the women and children." 

It may be that in some unearthly Island of the Blest the 
Melian dead are justified of their faith, but not in the world we 
know. 

"O thou Pomegranate of the Sea 
Sweet Melian Isle across the years 

Thy Belgian sister calls to thee 
In anguished sweat of blood and tears. 

"Her fate like thine — a ruthless band 
Hath ravaged all her loveliness. 

How Athens spoiled thy prosperous land 
Athenian lips with shame confess. 

"Thou too a land of lovely arts 
Of potter's and of sculptor's skill. 

Thy folk of high undaunted hearts 
As those that throb in Belgium still. 

"Within thy harbor's circling rim 
The warships long with banners bright 

Sailed bearing Athens' message grim 
'God hates the weak, Respect our Might.' 

"The flames within thy fanes grew cold 
Stilled by the foeman's swarming hords. 

Thy sons were slain, thy daughters sold 
To serve the lusts of stranger lords. 



14 AN ODIOUS COMPARISON 

"For Attic might thou didst defy, 
Thy folk the foeman slew as sheep, 

Across the years hear Belgium's cry, 
'O sister of the wine-dark deep, 

'Whose cliffs gleam seaward roseate, 
Not one of all thy martyr roll 
But keeps his faith inviolate ; 
Man kills our body, not our soul.' "* 

Thucydides has given us something more than an accurate 
chronicle of events. He has given us a great picture of the soul 
of Athens, of the breaking down of moral standards, of time- 
honored ideals, by lust for power reinforced by rancor and hate. 
He has given us a drama of the fall of man. Evidently he re- 
gards the Melian episode as the tragic climax. The real ca- 
tastrophe is not Athens, once an imperial city, later moaning amid 
the ruins of her glory, but Athens once the savior of Greece 
for freedom now saying to Melos "It is a crime not to be a slave." 

"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." After 
Melos, Thucydides represents the Athenians as seized by an in- 
fatuate recklessness. Throwing aside henceforth all pretense of 
military necessity, they embarked on that disastrous robber ex- 
pedition to Sicily whose frank purpose was the conquest and 
plunder of the rich settlements of what was then the Western 
World. 

Absit amen. I do not desire to press the parallel in all its 
details. I do not desire to overemphasize the itch for world-do- 
minion in Germany which may include designs upon our own 
resources. "Comparisons are odious." Lovers of Athens will 
think that I have strained the parallel ; admirers of Germany will 
not concede its significance. There are of course as many points 
of contrast as of resemblance. But on this ancient stage the 
Treitschkes, the Bernhardis, the Nietzsches, the Bethmann-Holl- 
wegs, the scraps of paper — all the nightmare shapes of military 
necessity — play their sinister parts. The form changes, the spirit 
remains. 

*The lines are by Grace Harriet MacCurdy. 



Hubris, old and new 15 

I do not mean to say that Athens alone in her time and that 
Germany alone in her time have run amuck in this way. Megalo- 
mania is not a rare disease. To the Greek mind it is a sort of 
original sin. It battens on prosperity; it is held in check only 
by the buffets of adversity. Unusual achievement, extraordinary 
power, breed that full-blown domineering pride which they called 
hubris; hubris breeds the tyrant ; and history in its largest aspects 
is a process of knocking bullies in the head. Perhaps this is too 
simple, and will not do for our modern complexities. But surely 
it has its measure of truth. That golden balance of modesty and 
self respect, which the Greeks named sophrosune is still the su- 
premely important virtue for men and nations, and there will be 
no living together in peace until we have it in a greater degree. 

The war has already chastened us all. I hardly recognize 
my fellow-countrymen; the spirit of brag is so strangely absent. 
Let us hope, let us pray, that it is the modesty of a giant gather- 
ing all his mighty strength against a powerful enemy. Even 
Germany has come to see that there are laws beyond her fancied 
necessities ; perhaps Maximilian Harden is right ; perhaps she 
has even now "learned the mysterious ways of Providence." To 
bring that lesson home is the object of this war. Whatever dark 
currents may once have coursed beneath this mad upheaval, the 
issue is now splendidly clear. We now know what we are fighting 
for; we are fighting and must fight to a finish for sophrosune; 
we are fighting for the spirit of live and let live. And to that 
spirit there must be no exception ; no vae victis has ever saved 
the world, nor ever will. The dying words of Edith Cavell have 
pronounced the sweet evangel which should melt even the rigor 
of the system which destroyed her : "Standing as I do in view of 
God and Eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must 
have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone." 



THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOUR 

LITERATURE SERIES 



1. The Congress of Letters, by Fkku Newton Scott. Professor of 
Rhetoric in the T'niversity of Michigan. 



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LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



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